Ecosia

Ecosia is a social business that was founded by Christian Kroll, Ecosia's CEO. Christian studied business administration in Nuremberg and decided to travel the world for some inspiration on a business model with a positive social impact. While staying in Argentina he learned a lot about reforestation projects in the Atlantic Rainforest in Argentina and Brazil and also read Thomas L. Friedman’s book “Hot, Flat and Crowded”. That has taught him about the connection between globalization and climate change and how planting new trees could actually neutralize CO2 emissions. That is how he came up with the idea of a search engine that helped finance planting and restoration projects. Ecosia.org was born in 2009 and the search engine that helps plant trees has launched in December of that year.

"We want to create a world where the environment no longer needs protecting."


"We invest in efforts that will pay off, grow and self­sustain in the long­term – both in the company, and in the world. We want to play a part in humanity’s ability to happily coexist with the earth, and we consider this in everything we do."

So, what can we do to help?

1. Set Ecosia as your default search engine.

2. Spread the word about this search engine to family, friends and colleagues.

3. You can visit this page or contact them directly if you are interested in using offline informational materials.

Here is one PDF file you can use: http://documents.ecosia.org/369423/8948583

4. Also, you can present it at your school, university, work place, choir, environmental group, gym etc and ask if people might be interested in setting it up as the company's or organization's default search engine.

"Let's say you search with Ecosia three times a day for a year. That would mean 1095 search requests a year. Since we plant a new tree for every 56 searches on average, you alone could finance 19.5 real trees every year. Now imagine that you persuade 500 people, for example in your office, to start using Ecosia and contributing to the tree planting effort. That would mean we could plant 9750 actual trees in a year. What if you could convince an organization of 5000 members to install Ecosia as their default search engine? That would be 97,500 trees planted in a year. All totally financed by searches. And now imagine a university with 15,000 students. If they were to all the switch to Ecosia you could finance the planting of 292,500 trees in just one year!"

Ecosia releases financial reports every month and tree planting receipts. You can check it out here:

Financial Reports & Tree Planting Receipts

What about CO2 emission?

By planting trees with its revenue from search ads, Ecosia automatically neutralizes its CO2 emissions. The industry standard for search engines is estimated to be about 0.2 grams of CO2 emission per search. One grown acacia planted in Burkina Faso can take up to 50 kilograms of CO2 out of the atmosphere in a lifetime. Ecosia earns an average of 0.5 cents per search at the moment. The average cost of planting a new tree is 28 cents, so roughly 56 searches plant a new tree.

Besides that, they offset their emissions with a Gold-Standard project in Madagascar run by their partner myclimate.